Introduction

That the Muslim world, from Egypt to western Iran, was predominantly and for centuries ruled by foreign dynasties is a fact that bore directly on the complex relationship between the rulers and the legists, on the one hand, and on the ways in which jurists' law was interpreted and applied in the social context, on the other. An important, if not crucial, feature resulting from the political, military, cultural and linguistic disjunctions between ruler and ruled was the preservation and, indeed, enhancement of ancient forms of social and economic autonomy and local self-rule. This disjunction only bolstered the dominant characteristic of pre-modern forms of rule, namely, the considerable degree of separation between the populace and the ruling regime. The latter quite simply lacked the necessary surveillance mechanisms that would permit direct control of the social groupings by which society organized itself. Whereas the great majority of disputes in industrial societies are resolved by state courts of law or arbitration regulated by state law, typically pre-industrial societies, and certainly those of Islam, were only marginally subject to government intervention. To put it slightly differently, in pre-modern Islamic societies, disputes were resolved with a minimum of legislative guidance, the determining factors having been informal mediation/arbitration and, equally, informal law courts. Furthermore, it appears to be a consistent pattern that wherever mediation and law are involved in conflict resolution, morality and social ethics are intertwined, as they certainly were in the case of Islam in the pre-industrial era.